Week 6 - How to create better scripts
CHU0387 | National Taiwan Normal University
Overview
This week, we will have a tutorial on how to prepare your computer for further analyses.
Create beautiful scripts that you can share:
- Reflections: Why creating scripts that are more suitable to share?
- Advanced scripts: How to use Markdown documents to share better scripts?
A brief summary of the essential elements:
No new codes this week. We will be using the same dataset as last week.
Please complete the following tasks before our next meeting:
- Transform your R script from last week into an R Markdown document, and knit it to a PDF file.
- Try to include Chinese characters, and debug such that they appear in the PDF document.
📊 Better and reproducible scripts with R Markdown
Standard R Scripts only save your code. R Markdown files are an incredible upgrade. They allow you to combine your titles, your narrative text, your R code, and your generated plots into one single, shareable document (like a PDF, Word, or HTML file). This is the gold standard for Open Science!
- To start, click “New File” > “R Markdown…”
- RStudio will prompt you for a Title and Author. Once created, you will see a document with a YAML Header at the top between dashed lines
---. This header controls the settings for your final document.
Writing text and code
- In an R Markdown file, anything you type normally becomes standard text. To actually write R code, you must insert a Code Chunk. Click the “Insert” button at the top of the script and select “R”. A grey box will appear.
The symbol {r} indicates that the code in the grey area is in R language. Hashtags # symbols followed by the | bar indicate settings for the block. Otherwise, they are just comments in R as usual.
- You can run these individual chunks using the green Play Button in the corner of the grey box.
